[KS] Re: Tayhanin cengkyopo

[Ross King]

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Hi Ann:

>Yi Kap... was from Phyengwen, in South P'yongan province. ...  Koreans
>from the U.S. branches
>of the Tayhanin kungminhoe were mostly P'yongyang Koreans.  ...

[snip]

>    The absence of lenition in p-irregular verbs that you observe in the
>article about Yi Kap, appears also in a 1913.9 issue of the journal _Say
>pyel_, in a poem written by Yi Kwang-swu: /aswup.e/.  Within the same poem,
>however, there is the spelling /nwunmwul kyewe/.  It is possible that
>archaisms or dialect were used for poetic effect in literary language.  ...
>    The journal Chengchwun published several poems in 1914 and 1917, written
>by Yi Kwang-swu, that also spell p-irregular verbs in the same way that the
>Tayhanin cengkyopo articles did. ...

These are interesting bits of information. What one would like to see,
though, is overwhelming evidence of consistent and prolonged orthography of
this nature from multiple documents, as one finds in the case of Soviet
Korean publications from the 1920s and 1930s.

One needs also to continually remind oneself that Korean orthography was in
a permanent state of chaos from approximately the beginning of the 16th
century, and that this orthographic anarchy continued unabated right
through the colonial period. The 1933 Machwumpep Thongilan did not become
official policy until after liberation, and one can even say that Korea has
never had a unified standard orthography (let alone language -- some recent
postings on this list seem to be confusing the notions 'prestige language'
= Seoul dialect and standard language...), and that what little
standardization has been achieved is on very thin ice, indeed. Thus,
rampant variation, inconsistency and experimentation in spelling is to be
expected, especially for the early part of the 20th century.

If more examples like yours can be found from Korea itself (as opposed to
from regions like Russia where we know most speakers spoke Hamkyeng
dialects that actually didn't lenite 'p' in verbs like 'hot' and 'cold')
from, say, the period 1909-1919 or so, and if numerous such examples
(penned by non-Hamkyeng dialect speakers) can be found, then we have
interesting evidence in favor of the 'hard-line morphophonemic orthography
principle' on the other side of my "Hamkyeng dialect influence AND/OR
hard-line morphophonemic orthography" suggestion.

It would certainly be interesting if  a study of Yi Kwangswu's works from
this period revealed a pronounced (no pun intended) tendency to spell this
way. Unfortunately, Yi Kwangswu does not appear to have ever explicitly
written anything propounding such an orthographic practice, and nothing I
have read about Cwu Sikyeng and his contemporaries contains explicit
mention of this either, though it may have been 'in the air'. Note also
that the period from approximately 1909 (the year the Kwukmun Yenkwuso
finished its deliberations about orthography only to have them promptly
deep-sixed) until the early 1920s is rather a bleak one for explicit
discussion about orthography (though I cannot claim to have read what
little there is yet -- certainly the Kwukmun Yenkwuso documents make no
mention of this type of spelling), and what little has appeared thus far in
contemporary Korean 'kwukehak' scholarship about that period in particular
and orthography in general does not touch on this issue, so far as I am
aware. So you would be making a rather strong claim if you were to suggest
that this particular orthographic notion originated with Yi Kwangswu (or
with Phyengan intellectuals in general).

But since Phyengan dialect just doesn't count as a non-leniting dialect
(despite whatever attestations one can find here and there in dialect
dictionaries -- a quick check of Kim Yengpay's works, the standard
references on Phyengan dialects, reveals lenited forms for 'hot', 'cold',
'near', etc.), if Phyengan Koreans of the period can be found in
substantial numbers writing this way, you may be on to something.

In any case, once the 'Soviet' Koreans did, indeed, become 'Soviet' and
Soviet cultural policy kicked in starting from the late 1920s, this sort of
spelling was ubiquitous (though not without exceptions) in Korean-language
publications from the Russian Far East, and whatever its origins, it jibed
well with the way the vast majority of Soviet Koreans actually spoke.
Unfortunately, the official Soviet Korean grammar of 1930 by O Changhwan
(_Kolye Muncen_), which more or less made official previous orthographic
practice and determined official spelling until the deportation of 1937,
doesn't actually spell out (no pun intended) WHY they chose to spell that
way.

Do you have any statistics on lenited vs. unlenited forms in Yi Kwangswu's
works from this period? It would be interesting to see them [but dreadfully
tedious to compile them...    :)      ].

Cheers,

Ross King